SAGE: Situational Awareness for the GTWO (Getting the Word Out) Environment)

New approaches are needed to address situational awareness and analysis in “getting the word out” (GTWO), in support public affairs functions. This proposal initiates R&D to exploit the combination of recent successes of highly-resolved epidemiological simulations and models of group identity and culture – to develop a unique prototype resource for assessing the effectiveness and future of GTWO campaigns. The technical approach is to adpat a mature epi-model to include message passing between individuals associated with identity or cultural groups and predict the degrees of support or opposition by individuals. Uncertainty/sensitivity management and cost-benefit analysis are captured – essential for potential command high-regret decisions. The SAGE resource is a combination of data from obtainable sources, the newly-developed GTWO simulation prototype, and CONOPS. The SAGE resource exploits the observation that the acceptance or rejection of messages are often determined by the association of the message with specific and possibly competing groups, rather than the more complex issue of the content and context of the message. The team includes experts on nationally utilized epi-models and operational cultural identity modeling. The activities also include assessment of development path for deployment in Corps and Theater-level C2 systems.